Most anyone who engages me in conversation about photography will soon glean my love for ephemera. When I peruse an antique store I am magnetically drawn to the flimsy prints and cameras of yesteryear - their lenses beckoning like the sad eyes of lost puppies or orphans in need of a loving home. It is a great joy to rehabilitate them, to give them purpose again.
Perhaps because of this unbridled enthusiasm for analog cameras, I have been the most grateful recipient of film, primarily from friends who have stopped using it. To be honest, it has kept me shooting all these years - although I can do the scanning myself, I don’t have a darkroom, and the film stock and developing fees can be prohibitively expensive.
Mostly it is expired (and by mostly I mean at least 95% of it), and with each year of its decline, the old emulsion produces infinitely more unique quirks and unpredictabilities.
Ordinarily I am tickled by these surprises, especially since my cameras have their own mischievous personalities, and am often delighted by the color shifts, the tonal abnormalities… the combination of both antiquated camera AND film producing a result which can never again be recreated. But there is a dark twin to this uniqueness and novelty.
Occasionally, the chemistry has degraded so much that I am taken aback by what I see. Sometimes this variability gives me something vastly different than what I imagined - sometimes the images are barely discernible… the contrast blighted, the texture of the grain mysteriously enlarged, completely eliminating sharpness and clarity. And instead of the joyful spark that I often feel from experimentation, I feel ashamed of the “bad” images, and file them away to never be seen by other eyes.
Part of this impulse is prompted by my work as a product photographer and retoucher over the last decade. My bread and butter work, as I call it, is precise; the lighting, composition, representation, and color must be perfect.
As a direct result of the exacting nature of my work, I am both drawn to the freedom that is provided by the limitations of film, but also feel there is a secondary limitation to what is acceptable to share. It becomes, to me, a reflection of my own ability (or lack thereof) instead of what it truly is - an exploration.
The last few years of my life have been characterized with personal entropy. A plethora of hard transitions, deaths, endings, and events which were out of my control, have seemed to plague me and my family disproportionately throughout this span of time. Even things I believed I could control through persistence and hard work (like starting my own business to free up time to make art) seemed destined to collapse.
In the face of these unexpected complications, these incessant degradations of the familiar and secure, it can seem the easier option to give up. Yet, however emotionally taxing and somewhat terrifying, I will keep transforming my life as the changes occur instead of succumbing to despair. And I will share with you one of the rolls of film I had previously discarded.
When I scanned this roll I was crestfallen. Instead of viewing the images with curiosity and engaging in the sort of analysis I love (namely, what processes of decay and disorder were present to bring about this one of a kind result), I shunned them and judged myself as a photographer.
In reviewing this roll I shot in June, after a few months had passed, I noticed that not only had the film started to degrade, but images themselves presented entropy. I had found beauty in old things breaking down and becoming a part of the landscape they lived in; the woods after a storm, branches split from their trunks, enough life left in some to still produce leaves.
Perhaps my circumstances have given me more compassion. They have certainly allowed me more distance from what I view as negative in these shots.
Something positive that came as a result of this time is that I have more of an acceptance of what is out of my control, and a greater ability to focus on what is still good in the present moment. An ability to see beauty despite imperfection.
